345. What the difference is between those who die in childhood and those who die in mature life will also be told. Those dying in mature life have a plane acquired from the earthly and material world, and this they carry with them. This plane is their memory and its corporeal natural affection. This remains fixed and is then quiescent, but still serves their thought after death as an outermost plane, since thought inflows into it. Consequently such as this plane is, and such as the correspondence is between the things that are in it and the rational faculty, such is the man after death. But little children who die in childhood and are educated in heaven do not have such a plane, but they have a spiritual-natural plane, since they derive nothing from the material world and the earthly body. For this reason, they cannot be in such gross affections and consequent thoughts, since they derive all things from heaven. Moreover, these little children do not know that they were born in the world, but believe that they were born in heaven. Neither do they know about any other than a spiritual birth effected through the cognitions of good and truth and through the intelligence and wisdom, from which man is a man; and as these are from the Lord they believe themselves to be the Lord's own, and love to be so. Nevertheless, it is possible for the state of men who grow up on the earth to become as perfect as the state of little children who grow up in heaven, provided they put away bodily and earthly loves, which are the loves of self and the world, and receive in their place spiritual loves.